On Saturday, 8 March, the Nexperia Philippines Inc. Workers Union (NPIWU) mounted a protest at the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) to express their year-long clamor against wage disputes, mass layoffs and union-busting approach of their employer-company. The protest is held vis-a-vis the four-day strike demonstrated within the companyโs compound in Cabuyao, Laguna and the third conciliation session between the union and the management over Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), the former having began on 5 March, a month after the concerned agency issued the Assumption of Jurisdiction (AJ) over this labor dispute. Need not to say; Fights like this must be state-backed. Unsurprisingly, it is not.
The measure taken by the labor and employment agency on 5 February only thwarted the demands of the workers, imposing the withholding of supposedly earlier strike through return-to-work order instead of leaning on the side of the labor force. This AJ order breaches the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of Right to Organize) and Convention 98 (Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining), which the Philippines ratified in 1953.
DOLE assuming the jurisdiction in no way amplified the calls by the inflicted union. It only exacerbated their long overdue frustration with the inhumane salary and benefit system by the tech giant they work for, and allowed labor and employment Secretary Buenvinido Laguesma to curate an order for police and military visibility around the encampment of the picketโ an obvious inclusion to the cases displaying the stateโs use of law enforcement to stifle dissent.
While the 74-hour NPIWU strike reached the hard-fought P50/day increase in daily wages, the hike from P17 to P50 since January 2024 connotes the staggered wheel of justice in terms of bettering working conditions, a situation with which the DOLE does nothing promptly to alleviate. Even as the strike receded, the fact remains in the plain eyesight: DOLE cannot pick up the slack and lead the battle against oppression, but instead pile on the hands which the oligarchs lift to make the union succumb to power as they profit better and better from them.
Such is a far cry from the departmentโs order, and thus denounced. If anything, this must be the last straw of their subservience to capitalist multinational corporations, or the capitalist structure, in general, as similar cases of labor welfare violations remain handfulโso that the mass gains off their concrete, people-centric duty for the labor sector, treating their constituents as no mere aggregate chips to a run screen of entertainment to the tycoons, but a dignified workers pushing off the system that curb them under chain-linked fists.